ay, if you look into the faces of the
passengers, there is dejection or indignation in the seniors, a certain
concealed sense of injury, and the lip made up with a heroic determination
not to mind it. Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest
inhabitant. We do not count a man's years, until he has nothing else to
count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable
of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not
disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we
shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us.

This is odious on the face of it. Universal convictions are not to be
shaken by the whimseys of overfed butchers and firemen, or by the
sentimental fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom on their
cheeks. We know the value of experience. Life and art are cumulative; and
he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves to be
heard on that subject. A man of great employments and excellent
performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth anything
until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the resolution of a
certain "Young Men's Republican Club," that all men should be held
eligible who were under seventy. But in all governments, the councils of
power were held by the old; and patricians or _patres_, senate or _senes_,
_seigneurs_ or seniors, _gerousia_, the senate of Sparta, the presbytery
of the Church, and the like, all signify simply old men.

This cynical lampoon is refuted by the universal prayer for long life,
which is the verdict of Nature, and justified by all history. We have, it
is true, examples of an accelerated pace, by which young men achieved
grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shakspeare,
Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare exceptions. Nature, in the
main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by
eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not
power. And if the life be true and noble, we have quite another sort of
seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely
old,--namely, the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand; who
appearing in any street, the people empty their houses to gaze at and obey
them: as at "My Cid, with the fleecy beard," in Toledo; or Bruce, as
Barbour reports him; as blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four
years, stormin